A Widget (WJT) is marketed as a Weird Japanese Thing, relatively offbeat and is compared to what is considered mainstream or popular (at least, for North American/Western European audiences). This has become more inclusive as anime and manga have developed a more mainstream presence, but usually exploits culture differences. The Widget Series often consists of Surreal Humor or a Gag Series, or in darker cases, Surreal Horror.

Sometimes they have small, short releases to test the audience, although they may have a guaranteed viewing among otaku.

Japanese cultural differences are the reason this trope exists and the reason it's not more popular. Japanese storytelling conventions embrace a number of elements that are much less commonly found in media produced by most other societies – some common examples include extreme absurdist humor (with a particular penchant for untranslatable puns), a fascination with gender-bending, and a fondness for ambiguity and open-ended conclusions. Simply put, Japanese culture can be refreshing to an outsider, but too much may cause a feeling of overload.

Until around the introduction of Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball to American pop culture in 1996, most anime was out of the American mainstream, with only a (very) few exceptions, principally ones that were and are considered to be of extraordinary quality in storytelling or artistry (such as AKIRA) – and every anime could be considered a Widget Series. Or something worse. Incidentally, even now many Japanese series are never ported over precisely because the original creators know it's weird and don't think there's a large market for it.

A weird series doesn't have to be Japanese to qualify as a Widget: some European, North American or Australasian series, like the ones from the examples below, are weird enough to compare with their Japanese brethren. Terms you'll likely see in this page include:

Note: Keep in mind that this trope is cultural, and is subject to the aforementioned Values Dissonance; what may seem normal or only marginally strange to one culture may come off as mind-blowingly weird to another, and vice versa. If an example here strikes you as not as unusual as the entry makes it out to be, you may want to take it to the discussion page instead of instigating an Edit War.

Examples with their own pages:

Examples:

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Anime and Manga

Akahori Gedou Hour Lovege is about two wannabe comediennes who take part-time jobs as superheroines. Due to them destroying the city every time they fight evil, they get mistaken for evil creatures and become feared by everyone.

Akikan! is a series about about empty soda/juice cans doing battle to determine whether steel or aluminum cans are superior, for the standardization of cans into one format, strengthening the industry. Oh, and the cans take the forms of cute girls in strange outfits...

Axis Powers Hetalia (and Hetalia: World Series): World history + countries turned into impossibly cute/hot guys + Ho Yay = this show (especially the English dub, in which most, if not all, of the dialogue is more risque than what the Japanese version has).

While Bakemonogatari is probably still bizarre in Japan, the religion/mythology of Japan at least let the original audience understand things like the crab gods and lost cows. And the puns. Oh god, the puns...

Black★Rock Shooter: Let's get this straight. We have the story starting in a Mental World with a Stripperific outfitted girl fighting other dream versions of girls, no clear heroes or villains, just some girls fighting each other for some reason, and this is before we meet the YandereWheelchair Woobie, Kagari, whose favorite hobby seems to be chucking gross-colored macaroons at people in both the real and Mental World. And an older woman who serves everyone coffee, but calls it "dirty water" when asked if she likes it. Then there's some Fractured Fairy Tale about a bird soaking up rainbow colors until it turns black and dies. And the color of the bird the hero most admires is actually the black dead one.

Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo: the characters confuse their enemies into submission, confusing the viewer in the process. The main character is a Kenshiro knock-off with a blonde afro who uses "fist of the nose hair", and the enemy is an evil empire that wants to shave everyone's head. That covers the first couple of episodes, and it gets weirder.

Cat Soup, which is considered to be weird even by the standards of weird Japanese things.

Chintsubu is a manga about boys who have talking penises. This one is so bizarre that it's often brought up in internet conversations purely as a benchmark of "how weird can Japanese media get."

Cromartie High School is a parody of old shounen shows, about a normal(ish) guy that starts going to school full of "badasses". And a gorilla. And a robot (that doesn't realize he's a robot). And a mute man that looks strangely like the deceased lead singer of Queen.

In Date A Live, there are girls who can cause massive damage to the world just by appearing. And killing them is just about impossible. The solution? Date them. And the Dating Sim-like choices that occasionally pop up as you do so are not decided by you, but by a group dedicated for this very purpose? An idea that only Japan can come up with.

Excel Saga. The American release even has the title written in faux-Japanese letters.

From the same people: Puni Puni Poemi. Two OVA episodes of sheer insanity. The 'magical girl transformation' involved shoving a knife up the rectum of a talking dead fish.

Fighting Foodons, which gives a whole new meaning to the word "food fight". More specifically, due to magic cards called "Meal Tickets", food can be brought to life, and so chefs are constantly competing to create the strongest food warriors.

FLCL. It's pronounced 'fooly cooly' (not even the characters know the meaning), and is about a crazy woman who beats a young boy with a guitar to summon giant mecha out of his head so she can kill them, in between hitting him with her Vespa just for fun.

Gintama. Its humor relies on a lot of Japanese puns, references to Japanese pop culture, Japanese-style humor, and a basic knowledge of famous historical Japanese figures. Though later on they also have gags like "Willis Smith" and sneezing the name "Mai-ke-ru Jackuson!" And a whole lot of in-universe running gags and random Widget Series staples. And it has two Star Wars.parodies.

Gloom Party takes the cake. It's a yonkoma series that the English publishers, DMP, knew would be incomprehensible to an American audience, since a large amount of the gags are Japanese puns, or refer to Japanese phenomena. Therefore, they added the words How to "read" manga to the title, made sure that the American edition contained only the strips that Western readers wouldn't understand, and added a short explanation of the joke to every strip, turning it into a guide to incomprehensible Japanese humor.

The Gothic World Of Nyanpire: An abandoned black cat is found dying alone during a rainy night. The same night, a vampire shows up and feels bad for the kitten. He decides to cut his finger and feed a drip of his own blood to the cat. Which results in the cat turning into an actual living vampire cat. He gains fangs, wings, and a yellow cross on his stomach, and later gets the name "Nyanpire" since he's a vampire. He lives with an owner who owns a Siamese cat named Chachamaru. He later befriends a Samurai cat named Masamunya who starts developing a crush on him. And a fallen angel from heaven named Nyatenshi who is constantly seen chasing a cat named Katsuo by holding a stick over a sardine that Katsuo has.

Hayate the Combat Butler, a series about a boy whose parents stick him with an enormous debt to the Yakuza, so he tries to abduct a little girl and ends up as her butler. The series also features aliens, robots, ghosts, demons, talking animals and involuntary time travel.

Hentai Kamen. It's about a martial artist slipping a pair of panties on his head (by accident) and transforming into... a guy with underwear on his head.

Jewelpet becomes more bizarre and laden with Japanese ancient and pop culture references starting with its third season, which alienates a lot of non-otakus.

Story wise, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure starts out as a fairly normal take on a zombie/vampire tale, albeit with some definite twists. But then there's the names, which almost all reference western rock and roll (Robert E. O. Speedwagon, Tompeti, Oingo and Boingo, etc.). And the art, which largely consists of muscular men in elaborate clothing striking model-esque poses. And some crazy character designs, such as Jotaro, whose hat seems to morph into hair about halfway around his head. Then in part 2, Battle Tendency, the cyborg Nazi, shows up and the craziness just grows exponentially. Part 3, Stardust Crusaders, is both the story arc where things really start to become totally insane, and initially the only part of the manga to be officially released in the US (until the earlier parts got released). America even got the Capcom fighting game based on Stardust Crusaders, which is the origin of the ZA WARUDOmeme.

Joshiraku: cute girls having quirky conversations about inconsequential subjects in the dressing room of a rakugo theater = rakugo being a uniquely Japanese form of comic storytelling by a single performer sitting still in the middle of the stage with only a fan and a piece of cloth as props.

Kamen no Maid Guy – that's Masked Maid Guy in English. A gigantic masked sociopath in a maid uniform terrorizes an absurdly well-endowed samurai schoolgirl for her own good. You just don't get that particular kind of "huh?" anywhere else on Earth.

Kill la Kill - A teenage girl dons a Sentient StripperifficSailor Fuku while wielding a giant half-scissor blade to fight her way through a high school ruled with an iron fist by its Absurdly Powerful Student Council in a post-apocalyptic world where clothing is fascism, all to find out who killed her father. And it's taken totally seriously in universe.

Kujibiki Unbalance is part parody, part homage to every anime genre Japan has produced. The resulting mix of postmodernism and Clichestorm is strange, especially to viewers who don't know the genres in question.

The Legend of Koizumi. World leaders use extreme high-stakes Mah-Jong to decide everything from deals to papal elections to SAVING THE WORLD! Everything is over the topshounen, playing all of the stereotypes of nations and their leaders entirely straight.

Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi. Basically, Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle on crack. Two kids jump through distorted, Alternate-Universe versions of their town trying to get back home. Each of them parodying a different cliche of Anime, Otaku, and Japanese culture in general. To people not familiar with Japan, the series is pure, incomprehensible randomness.

Mawaru-Penguindrum: Two brothers must find a mystery object known as the 'Penguindrum' for an entity residing in a penguin-shaped hat that is possessing and keeping alive their Ill Girl sister, in company with small cartoonish penguins that only they can see. And then the copious amounts of Mind Screw start.

The basic premise of My Bride Is a Mermaid is explainable (boy gets saved by mermaid; must marry her to keep up The Masquerade), but the execution of the premise is nothing short of insane, involving Mermaid Yakuza, a Terminator (really), and more Art Shift than one would think could be crammed in.

Nerima Daikon Brothers, from the director of Excel Saga. An anime musical series about farmers who want to become musicians but are constantly low on cash. One of the characters falls in love with a panda. Aliens appear.

The fact that One Piece is so insanely popular in Japan, but rarely becomes more than a Cult Classic even among manga in other countries, is probably one of the things that cement this trope.

Gonna be the Twin-Tail!!: Extra-dimensional invaders attack Earth not for its resources or to conquer it but... for its twintails? Rather, they're attacking Earth to drain the "zokusei" (something that has no direct definition in the West) of its people. Said Zokusei manifests in typical Otaku fetishes like bloomers, model-making, and of course, twintails.

Oshiri Kajiri Mushi, literally Butt-Biting Bug. Butt. Biting. Bug. This is an anime based on a children's song about a type of bug that makes people happier and more social... by biting their butts.

Ouran High School Host Club relies heavily on Japanese puns and wordplay, and might be a little bit strange to someone with little or no understanding of either.

Oyasumi Punpun[1] - a mute little bird (think Woodstock but three feet tall), drawn in line style while everyone else is drawn realistically, tries to comprehend his bad home life and the behaviour of people at his kindergarten. Occasionally, he summons God for answers; God has an afro and is getting tired of the same questions.

Pani Poni Dash!. It's about a school full of very weird students. And a ten year old MIT grad teacher. And a cat who says he's God. And a bunny who only exists to be abused. And space aliens who have little to no impact on the plot except to make Star Trek jokes. And a class rep who defies all logic or sanity. And apparently it's all shot on a soundstage and the cinematographer is very bad at hiding it.

Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt is surreal both plot-wise and design-wise, using Western animation art styles for the most part. Namely in the style of 90's American cartoons that were WHAT series in their own right.

Patalliro! is an old-school example. It's a very weird shoujo comedy with BL elements that started in the late 70s and is still running today.

Potemayo. A boy finds an over-possessive moe-blobin his fridge. And he calmly adopts it, naming it after what he had in the fridge. Then another one appears, except this one is a Tsundere, scythe-wielding moe-blob that Beam Spams from the worms on the side of its head, and leaves gifts of charred, bleeding animal carcasses on the desk of one of the boy's classmates. That's the first episode.

Saint Young Men is about Jesus and Buddha sharing an apartment in modern-day Japan.

Seven of Seven: A normal schoolgirl is subjected to Cloning Blues when she's split into seven copies of herself... who then all try to go after the boy she was interested in. Eventually, they take turns being the 'real one'.

Super Milk Chan. A five year old girl lives in a house with her robot maid and complains about all the bills she has to avoid paying to her Camp Gay landlord. She's a superhero but she constantly blows off the President (of Everything), who attracts flies. That's just the beginning of the insanity of this show.

Ultimate Teacher is beyond description. The most normal thing about it is that the school is so bad, there's a graveyard for dead teachers. Most of the 50 minute OVA is a giant Big Lipped Alligator Moment. Zombies? Check. Men wearing girls' gym shorts? Check. Guy who fights by flinging quarters? Check. That's not even getting into the genetic experimentation. It cannot be quantified.

The World God Only Knows. Dating sim otaku is landed with a demonic contract to make girls fall in love with him in order to drive out the evil spirits hiding in their hearts, and decides to do so by using dating sim strategies, which turn out to work astonishingly well. There is no possible way an idea like that could have come from anywhere but Japan, plain and simple.

Yakitate!! Ja-pan is a show/manga about bread. No, it does not teach you how to make the bread (one exception for bread-in-a-rice cooker). It focuses on tournament-style battles between bakers. And puns. Lots and lots of delicious Japanese pans.

Madman. It's hard to place it in one particular genre or the other. Usually, it's every genre all at the same time.

Savage Dragon is too violent and sexual to be a typical superhero book but way too fun to be a serious adult comic. Some of the villains this series has seen include a man who fires human waste with enough force to decapitate, a deadly Flying Brick with a chicken head, and a cute 3-foot tall warlord that takes over entire galaxies (and was friends with the hero's adopted daughter for a time). Then we have strange twists on expies of Doctor Doom or Captain Marvel. Then we have the other end of the spectrum with characters like Darklord and the Fiend who are very disturbing and deadly.

Never before has Canada's largest city been so quirky. Scott Pilgrim includes but is not limited to lesbian half-ninjas, psychic super vegans, bionic arms, Sexy Demon Hipster Chicks, abilities to manipulate pure sound using sheer determination, angry Chinese fathers with katanas protecting their obsessive daughters, and gay men as far as the eye can see (though the book focuses on a heterosexual couple).

Herman Hedningnote lit. Herman the Heathen but called Marwin Meathead in English editions. , a wierd Reference Overdosed swedish comic with the sickest sence of humor you are likley to encounter. One has to wonder what the hell is going on inside Jonas Darnell's head.

The genre of superhero comics is WAT to many people around the world. After all, one can stand a masked vigilante fighting crime, a wizard dealing with demonic incursions, or a mad scientist threatening the world from his faraway lair. Perhaps even a flying man wearing a cape and helping people. But to see all of them at once, teaming up to fight off an alien invasion? Only in America.

A Note: The Irish film industry is very small, even the large scale local films are only comparable to most US Indies. As a result, most domestic films don't bother toning it down for foreigners, and just make movies for ourselves. Expect profuse swearing, Grey and Gray Morality, a propensity for offbeat characters and very, very dark humour.

Waking Ned Divine: The eponymous Ned dies of a massive heart attack after winning the lottery. The local town bands together to cover up his death in order to claim his winnings. Hilarity ensues. Also, a very old man rides a motorcycle while very, very naked.

The Butcher's Boy: A young lad in rural 1960's Ireland loves nothing more than playing with his best friend. Then his mother commits suicide and he slowly starts going mad. As a result he's sent away to a borstal, where he has visions of a foul mouthed Virgin Mary, played by Sinead O'Connor, before being molested by a priest. Eventually he escapes, and returns home to his abusive alcoholic father, before finally losing it completely and going on a murder spree, having hallucinated the world being destroyed by nukes and being repopulated by humanoid flies. This is a comedy.

The Guard: An over the top homage to 70's Dirty Harry-esque, mismatched partner Cop Movies ... set in small town Ireland. The eponymous Guard (Irish Cop) takes acid, molest corpses, hires prostitutes, insults his American counterparts, buys his dying mother cocaine and contracts an STD. By comparison, the drug dealers he's taking down discuss existentialism and morality, and there's an off kilter scene about gay IRA operatives.

''A Film With Me In It": a film about a guy who really wants to be in a film but has been generally unlucky in his life, who keeps ending up with people being killed in incredibly incriminating accidents around his flat while he and his best friend keep proposing film scenarios in order to figure out how to get out of their predicaments.

Grabbers, a monster film about a group of giant squid-like bloodsucking aliens that attack a seaside town. High-alcohol blood is poison to them, so when they rampage one evening there's only one way to survive the night: get everyone to the pub and keep them sloshed all night long.

Adam and Paul, a more-or-less plotless dark comedy about two heroin addicts (modeled on Didi and Gogo and Laurel and Hardy) who spend a day wandering around Dublin trying to scrape money together to buy a fix. There are Amusing Injuries, an encounter with a patriotic Bulgarian, lots of dialogue that goes absolutely nowhere, and a generally weird and tragicomic tone.

Ginger Snaps - Werewolves as a literal metaphor for puberty. Shooting up drugs (well, wolfsbane) is the only way to temporarily slow the transformation. Its two sequels ramp up the weirdness even more.

Widget (Weird Japanese Thing)

Takashi Miike films, particularly his most extreme films such as Gozu and Ichi the Killer, tend to represent the most bizarre, violent and fetishistic Japanese strain of films to people outside of the nation.

Funky Forest: First Encounter is a surrealist collection of vignettes, some of which interact with one another and none of which make much sense at face value. For a taste of the madness, head here.

The Calamari Wrestler, and Minoru Kawasaki's follow-up film, Executive Koala are Widgets, being respectively about a wrestler who becomes a giant squid and a giant Koala who may have murdered his wife.

David Lynch. Twin Peakswas absurdly popular in Japan when it first aired. It still maintains a much larger and more fanatical following there than among fans from anywhere else, to the point that many Japanese fans were surprised to discover that it was created by an American, as it was considered to be "very Japanese" in style and tone.

The Western is a Weird American Genre (WAG). It's so deeply rooted in how other countries perceive America that we even have a trope about it. Ironically, many of the most beloved Westerns are Spaghetti Westerns, made by Italians for both the American and Italian markets.

Delicatessen is about a butcher in post-apocalyptic France murdering the janitors he employs in his apartment building and serving them in his shop, and when his daughter falls in love with one of the janitors, she enlists the help of a team of militant vegetarians to save him.

The City of Lost Children is about a mad scientist who lives on an oil rig offshore from an unspecified Steampunk city abducting children so he can steal their dreams; and when he abducts the little brother of a circus strongman, the strongman and a little girl from an orphanage go on a quest to get him back. And it involves a brain in a tank.

Amélie is about a woman attempting to make her neighbors' lives better by taking a garden gnome from one of them and taking pictures of it vacationing around the world, tricking an abusive greengrocer into thinking he's insane, and escorting a blind man to a train station giving him vivid descriptions of the surroundings.

Micmacs is about a video store clerk falling in with a clan of weirdos who live in a junkyard after he gets shot in the head, and then him and the clan taking revenge on the two biggest weapons manufacturers in France (one of whom created the landmine that killed his father, the other one which made the bullet that he got shot with) via a procession of "Home Alone" Antics.

Last Year at Marienbad is a French film that lacks a traditional plot, backstory, named characters, etc. It's a pretty good representation of some of the more difficult to access aspects of French cinma.

All the 60's films of Jean-Luc Godard, which pretty much sum up the craziness that was the French New Wave, and French art film in general.

Daft Punk's Electroma. Who ever imagined a town populated by people wearing Daft Punk helmets?

A Town Called Panic. A film based on a show animated entirely with toy figurines about a horse, cowboy, and indian toy being roommates. Horse is the main character.

The strange Spanish movie Amanece, que no es poco (At least it's dawning). The title itself refers to the last scene, where the sun rises.... from the WEST. Cue Title Drop from the no-longer-caring main characters.

All the movies starring the Mexican luchador El Santo also definitely qualify as a Mexican Example Of Weirdness (MEOW).

Mystics In Bali. Oh lord, Mystics in Bali! It's basically a WINDOT, a.k.a. Weird Indonesian Thing. Even weirder is that a lot of it is actually based on Indonesian mythology!

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is a surreal, allegorical 1970 Czech movie set perhaps in the 1800s about a 13-year-old girl's sexual awakening. Seemingly, every character who interacts with her is infatuated with her and/or a vampire. Or secretly her parents. Cut to cheery Gainax Ending.

Judging by the trailers of movies like Obonsam Besunote Devil May Cry, may or may not be a ripoff of the game, 2016, and The Godfathernote It seems that Don Corleone is a zombie now., the entire movie industry of Ghana seems to run on this trope. It's a SWAG (Surreal and Weird Arriving from Ghana). And special mention to Nkrato for this comment:

"I was expecting the silly karate, CGI monsters, and lots and lots of talking. Like any good Ghana Film. But nothing, absolutely nothing could prepare me for the cat﻿ mouth missile at 0:44"

Practically the entire resume of music video and film director Michel Gondry.

Valhalla Rising: a Danish/UK film about a mute one-eyed Norseman and a young boy, both slaves, who kill their pagan masters and join a bunch of Crusaders trying to get to Jerusalem. However, the crew gets lost and end up in America, where they all go crazy and get killed by mostly-unseen natives or each other. The film has very little dialogue, with long stretches of almost complete silence.

The Complete World Knowledge trilogy, which consists of books with Long Titles, filled to the brim with "100% false" facts, though the appendices in the paperback versions acknowledge the fact that occasionally a truth manages to end up in one of them by accident. In addition, the page numbering does not restart in later books in the series, instead picking up where the previous one left off. The second book also serves as a page-a-day calendar, which among other things reveals an Escalating War of bizarre precipitation between Richmond, Virginia, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the late 1970s. This would be classified as a WHAT.

Wicked! and Deadly! by Morris Gleitzman and Paul Jennings are two children's series revolving around the bizarre, including a killer superadvanced sheep army, and immortality-conferring tea. Anything by Paul Jennings generally counts.

Bizarro Fiction, as a genre, is comprised hugely of WATs, wabbits, wickets, and STANZAs as of this writing. However, multi-language examples are slowly rising.

Max Havelaar is considered to be by lots of Dutch literature critics to be one of the weirdest works in Dutch literature to be ever written. The main reason why is because the book is one of the first to change of writer and writing style dependent on the one character who at the moment of writing is writing the story (which is nowadays common thanks to postmodernism, but the book was written in 1840, which was long before the very first postmodern writers were born).

At Swim—Two Birds, a bizarre comic novel by Flann O'Brien, in which the protagonist, also an author, wanders Dublin and doesn't do very much of anything, comes across some strange quasi-fictional phenomena and eventually has to deal with his characters breaking the fourth wall and rising up against him.

I Survived A Japanese Game Show is a WHAT version of a Widget. The American contestants participate in a Japanese game show, and are eliminated one at a time.

Pushing Daisies. It involves an explosive scratch-and-sniff card, Paul Reubens, an author of adult pop-up books (all in the same episode), a red-and-white striped morgue, and a very American '50s Retro Universe.

The Monkees is filled with enough randomness and absurdity to qualify, especially during the second season, where they were either stoned out of their minds or didn't care any more and ad-libbed. ”Frodis,” anyone? The subsequent filmHead cranked it up a few notches.

Beakman's World. A zany-haired scientist in a neon green lab coat, his perky female assistant, a man in a rat suit, two penguins who watch the show from their home in the South Pole, famous dead guys, and a kooky and fun atmosphere to learn about science.

The Aquabats! Super Show! is often incredibly ridiculous, and indeed seems to revel in it. Laser guitars, cartoons randomly popping up, and odd plotlines often involving a rather strange Monster of the Week are only the start.

In-universe, 30 Rock shows a nonsensical musical soundbyte featuring Jenna smiling, winking, and laughing at the camera. She then says (out of the commercial) that she has no idea how it advertised Tokyo University.

Some have said that the problem with Iron Chef USA (the first American adaptation, featuring William Shatner) was that the creators assumed the original was only popular for laughing at wacky foreigners, so they didn't take it seriously. ICA occasionally pokes fun at the Kayfabe of the show (according to Alton, there are several Kitchen Stadiums, at least one of which is in space), but otherwise takes it seriously as a competition between culinary masters.

Dotch Cooking Show was an even more intense cooking game show that pitted two amazing-looking dishes against each other and a panel of seven choosing which dish to eat at the end of the episode. Each dish had its own crazy-awesome special ingredient. At the end, the people who voted for the winning dish got to eat it and the chef who made the losing dish had to (oh, darn the luck) eat it alone. Oh and the losers are forced to watch the winners eat as they get nothing at all. This show was amazing.

SASUKE and Kinniku Banzuke, which air in the US and Australia as Ninja Warrior and Unbeatable Banzuke, respectively. G4 heavily plaued up their status as wacky Japanese shows. Not only did they throw "ninja" into the first show's name, but the on-camera host who appears before and after segments on Unbeatable Banzuke, who only speaks Japanese and needs to be subtitled? He was the host hired by G4 solely for the American version.

Brain Wall, known to many American YouTubers as simply "Human Tetris". It lost much of its widgety charm when adapted for Fox as Hole In The Wall.

The six-episode variety show Vermilion Pleasure Night, which The Other Wiki compares to a Japanese version of SCTV. Recurring skits included a drama about a family of mannequins, a spaceship boarding house with a tortured alien, and a bunch of actresses being Barbie dolls. These are then interspersed with one off stories about cannibal cuisine, bondage nurses, and things that just take a sharp left turn halfway through a given sketch. This show hits you with weird repeatedly and never lets you up.

One Japanese show called Susunu! Denpa Shonennote Don't Go For It, Electric Boy! took an unsuspecting volunteer (who they told was going on an "important show-business related job", but that was it), then had him live in a small apartment, naked, with no supplies other than a pen and magazines. Then he had to live off of prizes won by magazine sweepstakes until he had the value of a specific amount of money. All this time, the guy was on TV and didn't know it, since he had been told it would be broadcasted after he was done. It seems almost pointless to mention that this is something that could only exist in Japan; in many countries the makers of the show would probably face criminal or civil penalties, and in the US (and maybe elsewhere, but especially the US), they'd be sued six ways from Sunday.

Within Sentai itself, there's Battle Fever J, which has bizarre costumes and a lot of dancing. However, it introduced the first robot in Sentai, and was thus the first Super Sentai. Toei eventually added Goranger and JAKQ into the ranks of Super Sentai, possibly to ensure that Battle Fever J wasn't the first one on the list.

Zyuden Sentai Kyoryuger in the vein of the above, features Samba transformations and two villains who represent the emotions Joy and Happiness, with many of their antics qualifying as killing with kindness. Also the Red Ranger appears to be The Kid-Appeal Character.

Season 2: The akibrangers take on a cosplaying sentai villain fanboy, meet alternate version of rangers. including Ryuuranger whose been reduced to a Chinese food mascot named China Red. They also get a second robot that is the size of a remote controlled car. not that its any less effective than their full size car.

LazyTown. The least bizarre thing is the pink hair on the central character. When the Canadian kids network YTV had the rights to the show, they put out a promo deriding the show for its weirdness, and theorized that the show must be made in Iceland by a giant gorilla - followed by a clip where the villain, dressed as a gorilla, climbs a giant antenna.

"Oh, it is made in Iceland? By a giant gorilla? Oh, well that explains it."

KLM being for more for adults (still being rated 'for all ages' causing it to having loads of Getting Crap Past the Radar). Heavily inspired by Monty Python causing the actors to be dressed in drags, jokes about christianity and especiallly about priests, dirty jokes, news parodies and the gods know what more.

Brødrene Dal is more aimed at children, yet still some Getting Crap Past the Radar. Here the really different men play brothers, or maybeSame-Sex Triplets, or just In-Name-Only. Named after 3 famous Norwegian valleys, although they might have a 4th brother in the narrator simply called Fortelleren, and in the 4th season maybe even a 5th which not even the brothers remember. The actors for the brothers themselves also act as many different characters.

The 1st season, og Profesor Drøvels Hemmelighet (and Prosfessor Drøvel(Uvula's) Secret) is for them to search for a friend who has something important to tell them. It has a ton of refferences to different Norwegian culture, pop-culture and some European fiction. Most similar to KLM having small shorts as Something Completely Different changes.

The 4th season and the Finale Season, og mysteriet om Karl XIIs gamasjer(And the mystery of Charles XII's gaiters), was made on request from the King of Norway himself. Made as a tribute to it being 100 years since the Dissolution of the union between Norway and Sweden. It's about Time Travel yet again. This time they have to find Charles XII's gaiters or else Sweden will force Norway into union with them again at the day of the 100 years annivasary. This season makes a Series Continuity Error, with the brothers living together again, and Brummund having a Secret Wife who lives in his room, who regulary comes down and steals the other brothers' breakfast, she also is a giant Parental Bonus by smoking a lot, her often being Ready for Lovemaking, and even being implied to be a whore. And why does even Brummund keep her as a secret, and often locked up in his room? It was even made in 2005! To make this season even weirder does their 2 nephews and niece come. The brothers doesn't remember the brother who's aparently is the father at all (might be the Narrator's or even Brummund's kids, or not). The three of them are all Mary Sues to an extent and do not serve any real purpose to the story, and who their parents are is never told either.

The 5th installment, a movie, og Vikingsverdets forbannelse(And the Viking Sword's Curse) is the real final adventure of the brothers. Made after Trond Kirkvaag lost his life to cancer, but with Brummund somewhat being in the movie due to putting him in from a taped version of the Stage Play. The brothers buy a time-machine on TV-shop, and are thrown 1000 years back in time. Now they are in the Viking Age. It became too weird even for Brødrene Dal itself and wasn't well recieved.

WTF (Weird Thing from France)

Téléchat, a French-Belgian puppet show from the 80's. The series is a parody of TV news presented by a black cat with an arm cast (which he uses as an all-purpose box) called Groucha and his female counterpart, an ostrich called Lola. The news (which Groucha does with the help of a sentient microphone) relates the life of "gluons", supposedly the smallest things in existence. Sometimes Lola will also have a talk round, with a fork and a spoon (with human faces!). There are also nonsense commercials with a green orangutan in the jungle, who always manages to screw up the take, to the chagrin of the spot's director; and Léguman, a parody of Japanese Sentai shows. Because of its quirkiness and freakish ambiance, this show scared a whole generation of French kids, who will tell you that it still gives them some feeling of dread if they try rewatching the show. An outsider wouldn't necessarily be traumatized, but would get that this thing was weird in a distinctly French (well, Belgian and French) way.

La Vie des Botes was a French sitcom about a robot family and talking objects (just like Pee-Wee's Playhouse), which aired regular cartoons between the live-action segments. The channel, TF1, put many hopes on this project (because it was a co-production with Canada, some designers from E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Alien worked on it) but it wasn't successful and it stayed for just one year; today, very few people remember this show.

Lazy Company, a French TV (mostly) comedy about four hapless GIs during the Battle of Normandy, featuring a Captain America ersatz, Hitler disguised as a nun, mad scientists, a friendly Japanese pilot, and general wackiness all over the place.

Wicket (Weird Canadian Thing)

In the same vein as Téléchat, we have Téléfrançais, a Wicket produced by TVOntario for the purpose of teaching French to English-speaking children that features, among many other oddities: a talking pineapple puppet that lives in a junkyard and looks like a rejected Furby, a fourth-wall breaking annonceur, and Les Squelettes, a musical group consisting of singing, dancing, instrument playing skeletons who will occasionally perform a number on the outside of a moving plane. It was also made in The '80s.

Nanalan'. Another Wicket for kids. A green little girl with a speech impediment visits her nana and plays in the backyard. For some reason, us Canadians thought that both this and Téléfrançais were educational. Have fun trying to find out what her dog's name is. Here's one short.

Banzai was a British parody of Japanese game shows, deliberately designed to be strange and incomprehensible. The show's greatest stunt? Pitting several ventriloquists against each other in the Puppet Petrol Pump challenge - the vents themselves had to put petrol in a car blindfolded, and the puppets had to shout to tell them when to stop. Closes to Â£20 worth won.

Doctor Who veers off into Wabbit territory every so often, especially when they make jokes based around British humor or accents. (The "lots of planets have a North!" joke, for one, only works if you understand what a Northern English accent sounds like.)

One episode had Rose Tyler trying to get the Queen of England to say "We are not amused." Hilarious for British audiences (and probably several Western audiences familiar with that real-life meme) but to Asian audiences, it would be odd-sounding and out-of-context.

Noels House Party. Specifically, Mr Blobby. Originally created as a fake childrens show character used for a Candid Camera Prank type section of the show, that monstrosity spiraled out of control and became a franchise that fits this trope in it's own right.

Bananas in Pyjamas, a kids' show about giant anthropomorphic bananas. That wear pajamas. And get cheated nearly every episode by the giant anthropomorphic rat that runs the corner shop. And there's the issue of their inherent desire to chase and hug giant living teddy bears.

Round the Twist. Plots include a skeleton's curse that forces the cursed to end every sentence with "without my pants" (from the episode of that title), gum leaves that can transfer injuries to anyone who can hear a song played on them ("The Gum Leaf War"), a ghost haunting an outhouse ("Skeleton On The Dunny"), and superpower-conferring underpants ("Wunder Pants")...in the first season. It gets weirder: Overarching plots including music played by ghosts who are trying to save their lighthouse, two ghosts wanting to save their loved ones from accidentally crashing on a boat thanks to human error 100 years ago, and doing so by possessing all of the regulars, including a young girl possessing a teenage boy and a viking love book. Based on the works of Paul Jennings, who's in Literature above.

From the creators of Italian Spiderman comes Danger 5. Danger 5 are an international team of spies charged with fighting against the Nazis and, ultimately, assassinating Hitler. This is a difficult task, as the Nazis are armed with dinosaurs, diamond women soldiers, and various other useful weapons. It's also set in an alternate 1960s, despite being about World War II.

EIEIO (Excessively Irish Example Of Intentional Oddity)

Father Ted, while produced and funded by the British Channel 4, was written and created by two Irishmen, Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews, and all of the actors, characters, locations, and crew were Irish. Collectively had the entirety of England, Wales, and Scotland asking "what does feck mean exactly?"

Weegeet (Weird German Thing)

Bernd the Bread: depressive, pessimistic, box-shapped Bread from a kids' show whose hobbies include staring at his ingrain wallpaper and collecting TV test cards... Just look at his profile!

Other

El Chavo del ocho has shades of this. It's a comedic Mexican series with a fairly normal plot but has a serious case of Dawson Casting. The very obviously adult comedians playing children can come off as unusual.

Newspaper Comics

The Knight Life, a Life Embellished webcomic with a tendency towards parody, is very much a WHAT. Such characters as a housewife who puts on an armless costume and fights crime as "The Masked Maggot," or a lowlife who works as a human rug and can identify shoes by how they press into his back, make sense if and only if one's familiar with the parts of American culture they're mocking.

Hol: Human Occupied Landfill. Hand-written in several late-night sessions in an IHOP, and originally offered no character creation since "everyone just makes the same types of characters over and over again". When character creation was included in the expansion, stat rolling included several strange and useless abilities, such as an "Almond Joy" stat. ("Roll 1-3: Sometimes you feel like a nut. Roll 4-6: Sometimes you don't.")

A lot of card-carrying mad genius Jenna Moran's (best known for Nobilis and Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine) non-commercial pet projects are just straightforwardly weird. One that's currently on hiatus is about mischievous little fairies and has a task resolution system based off circuit diagrams and predicate logic.

Experimental / indie / made for contest [RPGs] in general. From "Appliance Adventure" (a game about intelligent, talking household appliances) to "Get Out of Infernopolis" (storytelling gameified UNO where there is only one player / soul and everybody else is a GM / petty demon who makes the one player's life miserable).

Web Animation / Web Original

The Touhou fan video, Border of extacy by IOSYS is a widget with illogical pixellated imagery. Let's just extend that to "Half of all touhou-related songs and music videos" rather than list examples for half a page. Though some make more or less sense than others.

Llamas with Hats is, to put it simply, a series of videos describing the adventures of a psychopathic llama who visits and devastates a South American city, sinks a cruise ship, and nukes an entire city. All the while, his squeakily-voiced friend with a flowery hat voices his concern and condemns the madman's orphan-dooming actions by crying CAAAAAAARL! Repeatedly.

The Italian Spiderman series on YouTube is a STANZA. It is filmed in English, dubbed into Italian and then subtitled back into English. As well as being a parody, its' plot is fairly nonsensical, and it features various wonders such as surf-offs derailed by attacking penguins, and detachable exploding boomerang moustaches.

Although the plots in Neopets tend to be a bit more serious, the site itself has a LOT of weirdness. And that's why people love it.

Dutch Youtuber Massagraf. He usually makes YouTube Poops of Belgian kids' shows, which can (at times) be rather weird. An even weirder thing, however, is his Samsonimatie series, in which he takes characters from Samson En Gert and makes them do ridiculous things, such as drinking each other's heads through a straw. And if that's not weird enough for you, there's also vogeltje.

The Animutation genre can best be described as an American attempt at imitating widgets.

Mountain Time is about as WHAT as it gets, what with its constantly-derailing story lines, characters that range from astronauts to neurotic hamsters to Jewish garden hoses, and settings that are often nonsensical (such as clouds that turn into hams).

Western Animation

Freakazoid!. If you're a newcomer to the show, and not tearing your hair out in frustration, crying "WHAT!? THE!? HELL?!?" by the time the chimpanzee line rolls around in its opening theme, then you should probably check yourself into the nearest psychiatric ward. And that's just one of the many, MANY oddities that this show likes to throw at you.

Avez-vous déjà vu... ? is a Weird Thing from France (W.T.F.) that can easily beat FLCL and Azumanga Daioh for the title of the weirdest series in the world. Although it seems like all the information about this... strangeness... is in French, you can find some videos on the Internet by googling the title. It was made by Alain Chabat, who's considered as king of the weird in France.

Regular Show has the tagline "It's anything but [regular]". The events that happen in the episode are very surreal, and their resolutions more so. It also has its In-Universe widget anime: Planet Chasers Starlight Excellent. It's so nonsensical, it traps your mind within the videotape.

The Amazing World of Gumball is this in terms of animation (a mix of stop-motion, compuet-generated effects and traditional animation), characters (the protagonist is a blue cat with an orange fish as his adopted brother, and his parents are a pink bunny married with another blue cat; his schoolmates include a Tyrannosaurus rex, a paper-made bear, a cactus and a cloud) and events (very silly incidents that are taken too seriously).

Robotomy. A kid's show is about robots going to school is one thing, but one where something (or someone) is destroyed every other scene, the cast is almost entirely mentally unstable, and the ENTIRE planet is a war zone? Yup, pure WHAT.

Uncle Grandpa. From the moment Uncle Grandpa reappears in the picture frame after disappearing from view from outside, and then walking into frame from the side (if not sooner), it's been made incredibly clear that this show isn't simply on a rocket train to Weirdsville, it already arrived long ago, made itself at home and set up shop.

Perfect Hair Forever, a parody of anime in general and shonen anime in particular. The hero's mentor and the main villain look identical aside from one being nearly bald and the other having kaleidoscopicAnime Hair, and minions include Catman (who is just a guy in a cat costume) and Terry/Twisty, a walking, talking tree with a Split Personality (who later seems to do a Heel–Face Turn but that's around the point where the show stopped following the plot and started just being a Random Events Plot).

Sealab 2021, which has surreal, rambling plots and often outright insane characters.

Harvey Birdman, a show with the eponymous superhero-turned-lawyer as its protagonist. Many of his cases are based around jokes referencing old, sometimes obscure American cartoons.

The Brak Show, which parodies the trope in its WJT form in the episode "Sexy New Brak Show Go".

Black Dynamite, which focuses on fantastically warped versions of characters from out-of-date African American culture and just plain weirdness.

The rest of [adult swim], and quite possibly all other media that has ever been made, is put to absolute shame by Xavier: Renegade Angel. The main character is a creature with the legs of a goat, six nipples, the beak of a bird, and a snake for a hand. One episode ends with a casino being destroyed by sentient drops of blood. And that's one of the relatively normal episodes.

Rick and Morty falls more on the bizarre end of this trope. While sci-fi comedy is nothing new by any means, it has never been this demented. Planets and alternate universes with hamsters living in humans' butts, structures and organisms modeled on a cob down to the molecular level, sentient furniture beings that use humans as furniture and eat phones, sentient phones that use pizza as furniture, anthropomorphic pizza slices that eat humans... that's only the tip of the iceberg.

Chapi Chapo , a Weird French Thing, consists of the playful adventures of two small... children that manipulate innumerable boxes, and sometimes even physical laws.

Fireman Sam (a series about a small Welsh village in which everything is A Job For The Fire Service) originated in Wales as Sam Tân (tân being Welsh for fire, which is quite ironic seeing as Sam's job is to put out fires, so translated it could be Fire Sam).

Any episode of Teen Titans that begins with its theme song in Japanese is this. Especially the one where it is sung by a one shot, otaku character, according to Andrea Romano's comments in a DVD Easter Egg.

The Fleischer Studios with anything they did. There's a ghost of a walrus singing a song written by Cab Calloway, rotoscoped from Cab Calloway's dancing; as well as Koko the Clown's antics. Counts as a W.E.N.T, or "Weird Early Nineteen-hundreds Thing."

Parodied in The Simpsons, when an already manically bizarre promotional videotape for the Japanese cleaning product Mr. Sparkle includes, for no apparent reason, a brief clip of a reporter asking a two-headed cow, "Any plans for summer?" Then the cow shatters with a look of horror on its face(s) upon viewing Mr. Sparkle.

Some Tom and Jerry cartoons would probably count, since only jazz music was an instant hit worldwide and the culture took a little time to catch up, and also purely American-centric television tropes like Mammy Two-shoes. (Granted, on that second part, minstrel show anything would count. Droopy had a crapload of those kinds of jokes.) Not that they didn't exist in other countries, it just existed in different forms. Errr, is there a trope for humour that plain doesn't translate well?

Panique au Village (A Town Called Panic) is a bizarre Belgian stop-motion shorts series. Also, Pic Pic André Shoow by the same authors.

Les Renés, another Weird Thing from France, a series about a cyclop family, created by the French artist Hervé Di Rosa.

One of the earliest French CGI series, Chipie & Clyde, a series about a selfish wolf called Clyde who live in a loft and his antagonist, a girl called Chipie, who is able to send him by magic to make a test each time he says the F word. In the same case, Les Quarxs, a scientist who shows some weird creatures that came from nowhere which caused him some serious problems in his work.

South Park occasionally veers into this territory, especially in its more nonsensical episodes. Being a series that relies heavily on American popular culture and news, an outsider may find an easier time comprehending the episodes with Talking Poo. In the directors' commentary of FLCL, the director and the interviewer commented that South Park comes across as a big-time Widget Series in Japan since so many of the popular culture references are lost.

Aardman Animations animations are often filled with British terms that non-Brits might not be familiar with.

Rex the Runt manages to be the epitome of this. A bunch of claymation dogs and their adventures through time, outer-space, 'inside brains'...

The Presentators is one of these; an extremely short-lived series about a trio of otherwise-normal Cartoon Creatures hosting a TV show, featuring theme parks based on countries, hats that make music when lifted from the table, and reality-warping weather maps that can crush people with giant pencils.

ChalkZone. Kids having adventures in a world inhabited by walking, talking chalk drawings means lots of weirdness, alright.

Oscar's Orchestra on CBBC. Set in the very distant future, about a group of sentient music instruments (Oscar is a grand blue piano, and their leader) fighting the music-hating world dictator Thaddius Vent.

Jacob Two-Two is very much a wicket. It includes major references to hockey, is set in Montreal, has an explicitly stated Quebecois character, and has assignments about Canadian explorers. There's also the Canadian style of humour in the show.

Celebrity Deathmatch: Take two or more celebrities, put them in a wrestling ring and make them duke it out until one of them is left alive. Then make the whole setting a World of Ham. With lots of bloodshed and violence, this show is a prime example of Widgetness in claymation form.

Codename: Kids Next Door is a series where kids are menaced by an evil conspiracy of adults and protected by a Benevolent Conspiracy of kids, in a reality where Saturn's rings are made of stuffed animals, the stuffed animals themselves have real animal counterparts (some of which are gigantic), jungle gyms lead to islands with chocolate volcanos populated by wedgie-sauruses - you get the idea. Anything can happen here, and probably will in this crazy world.

Jimmy Two-Shoes. How many other versions of Hell have giant talking sandwiches (among other objects), a month in which everyone falls asleep for a day, evil pickles, biker clowns, a perfume that turns wearers into giraffes, talking animals, racing fleas, evil space unicorns, and a demon version of the Tooth Fairy? It's probably worth noting that a lot of these happened in Season 2 as opposed to the more defined Miseryville of Season 1.

The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy is what happens when you combine this trope with Black Comedy and Grossout Show. Episode premises have included a principal and a hippo being turned into rappers, Billy turning the world into a 40s-era cartoon by juggling chickens, an invisible fart-imitating duck annoying everyone, and a parody of Hanna-Barbera cartoon characters trying to conquer the world by stealing beds.

Cow and Chicken. A couple, who both happen to be a pair of legs, have two children: a cow and a chicken. The duo are harassed in every episode by an insane, crosdressing demon who emphasizes his lack of pants and the former of the two can turn into a Spanish-speaking superhero. What.

Yakkity Yak, an obscure and short-lived Gag Series by Teletoon that also aired on Nickelodeon in 2003. It's about the adventures of a yak who lives in the town of Onion Falls and dreams about being a comedian. By itself that's weird enough, but to add to it, his best friend is a pineapple-headed person, his agent is a trilobite, and a mad scientist with hair that changes colour based on his mood and a robot daughter/assistant lives in his basement. Yup, a Wicket in the purest sense of the term.

Coconut Fred's Fruit Salad Island. Take Spongebob Squarepants and Veggie Tales, throw them in a blender, add a whole load of plots so nonsensical and random that you head will be spinning by the time the episode's over, and make them into a cartoon. Voila, one of the weirdest cartoons ever made.

Teen Titans made reference to this, as the weirder episodes (such as those involving insane Reality Warper villains like Mad Mod and Mumbo Jumbo) usually had the theme song done in Japanese whereas the more "serious" episodes had it in English. Follow-up series Teen Titans Go!, while less Animesque, just outright drops the seriousness and embraces WHAT territory.

Soupe Opéra: Definitely a Weird Thing from France. Fruit and vegetables move around and form animals, all to '90s-sounding music.

WordWorld: Everything and everyone is made of the letters in their name, and new objects (and even new characters) can be created by just putting the appropriate letters next to each other. It's especially strange by PBS standards.

Most small Toyotas since about 2000 have this to some extent or another.

On the international front, ridiculous little dinky cars and hatchbacks from all around the world are perceived this way by Americans.note This is starting to lessen somewhat in more densely-populated American cites like New York City, due to the sheer impossibility of finding reasonably-priced parking there. The ultimate example is the autorickshaw, a demented little car-thing built around a motorcycle.

A western example is the short-lived Yggdrasil 'green' motorcycles. We can't link to an example, unfortunately, as the website has been down for about two years. If you've played or seen screenshots of the game series Xtreme G, they resembled those cycles but only went about 140-170kph and were sold in small numbers in mainland Europe as an environmentally conscious alternative to move from point A to B. They were cheap to buy, but annoyingly expensive to maintain, and attempts to sell them elsewhere were met with confusion and head scratching elsewhere (and even at home) due to the way-too-futuristic designs and odd seating arrangement. (ridden as if you were straddling a rocket Wile E Coyote style).

Microcars/small cars in general and Smart cars in particular may also be seen this way in North America. This is caused by Japanese and European car makers not bothering to sell their microcars and more left-field models in North America in a self-fulfilling cycle of lack of demand from lack of products from lack of demand... Conversely, a lot of places in the rest of the world perceives their relative absence and the preponderance of big sedans, pickup trucks, and SUVs for city dwellers as just as strange. The last few years have however seen SUVs getting commonplace in Europe, so the trend might be changing.

The whole Morgan car company is a weird British Car Company: two-seat roadsters with a 1930s design and wooden chassis? Three wheelers with the one wheel at the back?◊. A car with crossed eyes◊? Jeremy Clarkson did a thorough investigation of the phenomenon of British sports cars and their drivers here, noting the irony of a country infamous for its wet, chilly weather being the home of a car that seems meant to be driven on warm, sunny days.

In one of his solo feature-length DVD releases, Top Gear star Jeremy Clarkson has also introduced many British and American gearheads to this DOT (Dutch Oddity of Transportation), the Vandenbrink Carver. It was subsequently reviewed on Top Gear proper by the Hamster here.

Top Gear also had a segment about the bizarre creations of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact civilian car industry, ranging from Russian compact sedans with holes in the bottom for ice fishing purposes and some kind of...thing from Czechoslovakia with three wheels and a body made of leather.

Men With Brooms is possibly more Weirdly Canadian than Kids in the Hall. It's a sports comedy about curling, that also features Paul Gross, Leslie Nielsen (as a retired curling guru and hallucinogenic mushroom enthusiast), a guest appearance by Canadian rock group The Tragically Hip, a bagpiper in a kilt with no explicit connection to the plot, and a running gag involving beavers.

Cirque du Soleil. This Weird French-Canadian Thing first caught attention in the U.S. because it was so different from the long-established, Ringling Bros.-dominated circus format. No animal acts, one ring, little dialogue, New Age/world music, etc. It actually took a lot of inspiration, and later performers, from established European and Asian circuses, but managed to make its own artistic statements and remain distinctive, to the point that their overall style has spawned its own imitators (By the way, the Japanese love Cirque, to the point that the non-touring show ZED was created for Tokyo Disneyland). Their 2003 TV show Solstrom is a true Widget Series: a mostly silent fantasy series that links acrobatic and novelty acts together via whimsical stories involving mischievous "sun creatures" (characters from the various stage shows) running amuck on Earth.

"Hitsuji de Oyasumi" is a series of short talk CDs featuring various Japanese voice actors Counting Sheep. Not just a few sheep, either; most of the albums go to 400, plus short openings and closings and occasional other mid-count comments. There are at least 22 volumes of this.

Although books of humorous stories and "laws" about how things go horribly wrong are a somewhat common genre, The Peter Principle, with its punny names and fantastically banal "case studies", is not only the most famous but the most uniquely wickety of all of them. (It was, however, inspired by Parkinsons Law, a hilariously turgid Wabbit.)

Japanese Bento Lunch Tools. Ever see egg molds? Take a boiled egg, while it's still hot, shell it, and place it into one of these. The resulting shape can be anything from a bunny to a fish to an ice cream cone. There are also ones that essentially makes egg logs with the yolk in varying shapes, such as flower, star, heart etc. On a more extreme note, this kit.

This weird Estonian thing that gives a person one euro if one Estonian kroon is inserted into it, instead of 15.6466 kroons to one euro. It's a cow.

Ao Usagi's art. A lot of it is Touhou fanart. Some of it is incredibly normal. Sometimes it's a boob in an orange peel.

tykylevits' videos make very little sense until you do some research and find out that, yep, he's from Finland. Then it seems perfectly normal.

There are also the Japanese vending machines which dispense things like live crabs/lobsters and used panties.

American "Christian Media" can come across this way to secular people, even other Americans. Sometime in The '70s, evangelical Christians in the US became deeply enraptured by the concept of creating alternatives to "secular" pop culture. This grew to encompass literature (the Left Behind series is one of the most visible examples), music, movies, video games, dating sites, and more, to the point where it eventually became an entire separate subculture. Chick Tracts also fit the bill.

The Japanese have a weird obsession with making as much noise as possible when driving a car or motorbike (even if that noise is the sound of the engine being shredded). They love to rev the crap out of mopeds for no apparent reason.

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